


Cactus Flower (or There ain't no grave)

by aster_risk



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8, Ocean's Eight
Genre: Don't Try This At Home, Emotional Porn, F/F, Major Character Injury, Near-Death Experience, Recklessness, Resolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 05:56:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15066635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Lou crashes the bike in desolate New Mexico, and Debbie—rife with unresolved attraction and what she suspects people call 'love'—goes after her.(With apologies to Johnny Cash for stealing his song title.)





	Cactus Flower (or There ain't no grave)

When her phone rings, four PM on a lazy August afternoon, Debbie is melting like hot wax over Tammy’s kitchen stools. Her cheek smushes into her fist, propped half asleep against the counter. A glass of ice tea sweats beside her. The warehouse had grown eerie in Lou’s absence; as the temperature climbed, its air smelled of dust and hot aluminum, and her voice echoed off the walls like a choir of poltergeists. Eventually, she couldn’t stand to laze about the place and paid Tammy a visit.

“Are you gonna get that?” Tammy asks, wiping the counter free of crumbs.

Her gaze flicks to the buzzing phone. “Why would I?”

“It could be important.”

Debbie sags into her seat. Glancing at the unknown number— “It’s not Lou.”

“Oh, so you’re sulking around my house because your girlfriend took a vacation without you.”

“Not my girlfriend,” Debbie scowls, but her heart isn’t in it. “And only if by ‘took a vacation’ you mean ‘fucked off the face of the planet.” That’s the real issue, here—Lou went AWOL a month after the heist without so much as a goodbye text.

“Bullshit.” Tammy rolls her eyes. “You two are practically married, and you know it. Your—how did Constance put it— _eye sex_ makes everyone around you uncomfortable.”

“Tammy, it’s _Lou._ Lou is—” Solitary, impulsive, off the map in more ways than one.

“As head over heels for you as you are for her. Trust me.”

“I’m not—”

“Debs, we’ve known each other for a long time.” Tammy leans over the counter, resting her hand on the lid of the blender and shooting her a very pointed look. “You can’t lie to me. I am the only genuine adult in your life, and _as_ an adult I reserve the right to tell you to get your head out of your _ass._ ” She lowers her voice to a whisper and throws a sidelong glance at the hallway, checking for eavesdropping children. “This… _pining_ needs to stop.”

“I’m not talking about this,” she tells Tammy under her breath. It is as close as Debbie Ocean gets to _you’re right._ Privately, she has resigned herself to the possibility that Lou got tired of waiting for a declaration of love. She has _not_ yet resigned herself to the possibility of never seeing Lou again.

“Have you heard from her at all?”

“No one hears from Lou when she’s on the road.” Also not entirely true: A week after she left, Lou sent her a photograph with no caption, of a blush-pink flower sprouting from the arm of a saguaro. She didn’t respond.

Debbie’s phone buzzes again, rattling the granite countertop. The same number, a 505 area code and an ominous persistence, flashes onto her screen. Tammy arches an eyebrow, purses her lips worriedly.

“It’s a con,” she assures Tammy.  

“How do you know?”

 “Because I’ve _done_ that con.” She tries to sound confident; phoning it in has always been her specialty, but the facade drops where Lou is concerned. She can’t suppress the tug in her gut—what if it _is_ Lou, calling from some pay phone in the middle of nowhere? She wants to hear _I love you. I miss you,_ through static and Lou’s husky drawl. They’re both romantics at heart, beneath their wit and jaded shells.

The phone goes quiet. They let out sighs she didn’t even know they were holding. Then, after a moment measured only in relieved breaths, it buzzes again. Same number. Tammy opens her mouth, but Debbie caves first. She grabs the phone off the counter.

“What the hell do you think you’re—”

“Harsh, Debbie. And here I thought you missed the sound of my voice.” Lou rattles her, rough and rousing through the speaker. She presses her lips together and fights back a smile, keeps her optimism in check. She can’t help her sharp intake of breath, or the thrum of her heartbeat, or the nagging sensation that something isn’t right.

It’s the name that throws her. Maybe the unknown number should concern her, but sirens wail in her head every time Lou says her name, and not ‘Honey’ or ‘Deb,’ or ‘Sweet’ when she’s tipsy. Her name only crosses Lou’s lips in moments of intimacy, uttered as a prayer or a curse. Never in passing, never in greeting, never in casual conversation. The last time Lou greeted her with “Debbie,” she cornered her in their miniscule apartment and read her the riot act about trusting Claude Becker. Two months later she was in jail.

“I thought you were a scammer.” She goes for nonchalant—she always does, with Lou. Her hand trembles, but her speech remains steady.

“I am,” Lou replies.

“Ha ha. What happened Lou?” She can hear the exhaustion in Lou’s voice—it was always weathered, sure, but her familiar accent and the swing of her words have given way to a cadence Debbie doesn’t recognize, like a violinist playing with snapped bowstrings.

“I need you to come to New Mexico.”

“Why?” She wants it to be a job, but there’s nothing in New Mexico she feels comfortable stealing.

“Good news or bad news first?”

 “You’re stalling.” She wouldn’t call it so blatantly if her heart wasn’t cracking her damn ribcage. She hates where this conversation is going; she hates Lou’s inability to admit something went wrong, hates it even more because she _understands_ it. She had plans, impressive plans, and even as the detectives were slapping handcuffs on her wrists she convinced herself those plans would run smoothly. She would sell the art; she would rig a poker tournament; she wasn’t going to jail. Everything was going to be fine.

“I ate shit in San Juan Valley,” Lou growls. “I was racing a local biker, and a rock flew into my spokes. I hit a hoodoo so hard I smashed it. As it turns out, rocks are stronger than people.”

“Jesus Lou, when was this?” Debbie holds her breath. Tammy is staring at her across the counter, eyes wide as dinner plates.

A pause. “Four weeks ago.”

 “Why the hell didn’t you _tell_ me four weeks ago?”

“Why does it matter?” Lou sounds infinitely more bitter than she did two minutes ago, but more importantly she sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. Lou. On the verge of fucking tears. And Debbie’s not sure whether to apologize or panic. Hearing Lou waver like that flips her guilt switch like nothing else can.

“It’s bad,” whispers Lou. “It’s fucking bad.” she collects herself. “Come to New Mexico. I’ll text you the address.”

There’s a decisive click, and the line buzzes eerily. She puts down her cell phone.

“Deb?” Tammy waves a hand over her face. “Deb, what happened?”

“Lou crashed the bike in New Mexico,” she tells Tammy, and it still sounds like a cosmic impossibility, like she’s looking in on some other universe or maybe just tossing and turning through a routine nightmare. Maybe she’ll wake up in an hour.

“Is she all right?”

Debbie slings her bag over her shoulder and pushes in the stool. “I don’t know,” she snaps in Tammy’s general direction. “I don’t know, God,” she hunches over the counter, resting her elbows on the cool granite and pressing all ten fingers to her temples. “I don’t know,” she whines again, trying and failing to inhale. “It’s really fucking bad, that’s all she said.”

Tammy, always a mother to her friends in some capacity, rests her palm on Debbie’s back. “If she called you, it can’t be that bad.”

“I’ve never heard her sound like that before, Tam,” and the tears come as a shock. Somehow, she never thought she’d break this easily. “She sounded so… fragile. _Lou_ did. Do you have any idea what it would take for her to sound like that?”

Tammy presses her lips together. Debbie knows she’s lost for words, lost for solutions. Debbie doesn’t blame her—she’s supposed to be the calm, collected one, not the fearless criminal mastermind having a panic attack at her friend’s kitchen counter. And yet—it’s _Lou._ God, everything in her aches for Lou; she’s so in love with this woman. She needs Lou like her own blood. Losing it drop by drop since May is slowly killing her, but hearing Lou crack is unfathomably worse. She imagines losing Lou in one fell stroke, running in circles like a chicken with its head cut off.

“I know how I’d feel if it were my husband.” Tammy tells her. “I’d want to see him as soon as possible. I would want to hug him and kiss him and reassure myself over and over again that he was alive.” She, too, seems on the verge of terror, but suppresses it for Debbie’s sake. “That’s why you need to pull yourself together, Deb. Go to New Mexico, and don’t come back without her.”

 

* * * * *

New Mexico blisters her skin. She rides the adrenaline of anxiety and tangible heat waves, barreling through the wasteland in a canary yellow rental car. She watches the skyline through Lou’s black aviators, her shoulders pinking through the open window. Sunscreen is for tourists, for people whose best friend isn’t lying on some stale hospital cot.

A billboard shimmers against the buzzard-flecked sky. _Jesus Saves. 1-800-TRUTH,_ in block letters, a raven perched on its rim. She wonders if Lou passed the same sign, revved her motorbike and tossed back her head in irreverent laughter. She understands now, why Lou loves the desert. It’s hellish, desolate, but if she looks closely it brims with tenacious life. Rattlesnakes and roadrunners and the skulls of lost cattle, bleached like fine decor. The undergrowth sprouts spines for foliage. Creatures here breathe dust, drool poison; at night they mate and birth beneath the sand. Lou belongs here, a leathered and weathered outlaw of a woman ripping through hell with the scream of a two-stroke engine, grinning into the blaze. Beneath her prickly shell, she is ripe and lurid as a cactus flower.

Eventually, the highway winds into a labyrinth of hoodoos, lurching overhead like the ghosts of cowboys summoned by her arrival. By _Lou’s_ arrival. They line the road, her honor guard as she nears the town of Farmington. Behind the hoodoos, toothy spires of rock jut toward sky. She thought the rock here would be redder, ruddier, but it seems the New Mexico sun has stripped the landscape to its bones, as it strips everything that lives and dies here.

           

* * * * *

 

She tells the receptionist she’s here to see a Moira White. She recognizes Lou’s alias from their youth, scamming their way through Vegas casinos, counting cards at cocktail parties. She gets in with a confident “I’m her sister” and an updated ID reading Carrie Everton-White. For the first time, Debbie can’t help but think how much easier it would be to do this legally, to respectfully offer her real name and cement her place in Lou’s life.

She finds Lou in beaten-down street clothes—a leather jacket that’s clearly seen some shit and a turquoise vest. Something in Debbie seizes when she notices the tie—even here, in a fucking hospital, Lou had to put on her tie. She sits on the edge of bed, her palms digging into the sheets. She is painfully out of place here, in this muted room that smells of antiseptic.

Debbie shoves her hands into her pockets, let the car key dig into her skin. “Hey, Lou.”

Lou looks up, and something like shyness—as close as Lou’s ever come to it—passes over her features. Shyness and two thick, white scars along her chin and cheekbone, where lines of stitches had done their part. “Hi.”

 

* * * * *

 

The story is one Debbie has heard a thousand times— roving, hungry-eyed man grasping at a young waitress. Lou, who’s gritty sense of justice rails for all the girls who used to be her, putting her glitzy, green boot between the _him_ and the _her_ and daring him to protest. The waitress scampered back to the kitchen, and the man spat tobacco through his salt-and-pepper beard and asked her if it was here shiny new bike out front. If she meant it when she told him to _back off_ , if she had the balls to back it up.

The girl—Laura, eighteen, waitressing to pay her way through college—watched it go down. She watched them scream down a dirt highway track where at night, kids smoke fat cigars and homemade blunts and race their purple Volkswagens into the moon. Where one day in July, Lou smoked a man like a cheap cigarette until he kicked up a rock and it caught between the wrong two spokes of her wheel, and she barreled so fast into a sandstone spectator that it crumbled.

“Thing is,” Lou says now, “the bike took most of the damage, but that’s not saying much. The rock shattered like shrapnel. One piece stuck in my leg, another one in my hip. There were other things—a couple bruised ribs, a few stitches, but Jesus, Deb. There was a lot of blood.” She stares, fixates, on the scuffed tile floor and takes a deep breath. “I died out there. The rock nicked an artery. They only told me when I came to.” Another pause, another breath through her nose. “My leg is fucked.” She glances up to meet Debbie’s espresso-brown eyes, and Debbie knows that despite her best efforts Lou can see them water.

“I don’t mean broken, Deb. I mean _fucked._ I mean, it’ll walk, but never without help. Some things just can’t be fixed, not when a slab of rock the size of a railroad spike ripped through them.” She blinks at Debbie, hoarse and frustrated and trying to gauge a reaction. “Are you going to say _anything_?”

Lou can’t look at herself in the silence, not yet. She fucking _died_ here. Debbie always pictured Lou as the rebel riding through the wasteland, but she was nearly another body swallowed into it and bleached beneath its endless sky. “You’re really something, Lou.” Her lower lip trembles in a relieved, tired smile. She rests a hand on Lou’s shoulder, reassuring herself that her partner is not a ghost.

Lou makes a face. “Well I better be,” she drawls, “I came back from the damn grave.”

“Yeah,” Debbie whispers, letting her fingers run through Lou’s un-styled hair, committing to memory her partner’s soft planes and sharp edges. “Yeah, you did.”

 

* * * * *

Lou forges Moira White’s signatures on her release forms while Debbie gathers some of her things.

“I didn’t want you to see me in that Godawful hospital gown,” Lou confesses, “so I sent Laura to my hotel for a change of clothes.”

“Laura, the waitress?” Debbie asks. Lou mentioned she’d used the girl’s phone to call her, and that she had been by.

“Yeah.” Lou ties back her hair with a snap of a rubber band. “She wanted to help. Apparently, I ‘defended her honor.’ She was a smart kid and didn’t ask too many questions about where I came from, so she made good conversation while I was trapped in this awful room.” In their line of work, honest conversation has always been a luxury. It’s never strangers they have to worry about, but people close enough to trust. There are two kinds of people a thief can talk to: a trusted partner and a friendly face she’ll never see again.

“Done.” Lou sets down the clipboard on her side table. She drums her fingers on the wood. “I’m not sure—” her voice falters, and Debbie’s heart breaks. “I’m not sure how to do this.” How to walk out of here, how to reclaim her freedom. This was the heartbreak Debbie hid while she was schmoozing the cops for parole.

She looks at the sleek black cane leaning against the bed. Its head is a gleaming cobra, its fangs poised to strike. Leave it to Lou to find a cane that looks like it belongs to a fuck-you rich Grim Reaper. It’s impressive, really.

She meets the cobra’s emerald eyes, then Lou’s blue ones. “Where did you get that?”

Lou smirks—a raw, tainted thing—and says, “I stole it from Bram Stoker while I was dead.”

“You _would_ rob a Victorian aristocrat.”

“Well,” Lou replies, with distinctly less spring than Debbie’s used to, “turns out Amazon will deliver your shit anywhere when you have thirty-eight million dollars.”

Debbie snorts out a laugh and waits. She looks at Lou, wearing black leather and velvet on the cot’s stark white sheets, her legs dangling over the side. She looks at the stumped pout of Lou’s lips and the furrow of her brow as she decides to _do this_ but doesn’t know what she’s doing or how. The cobra’s head bursting from a slick cane, staring Debbie down.

 _What now?_ it seems to ask.

She thinks of the night Tammy’s son was born. She wasn’t there—she was in prison, missing her friends’ life milestones and entertaining revenge fantasies—but one day over coffee Tammy told her the story. How she lay in the hospital bed, haggard and hungry, with this fragile-as-cobwebs _being_ wriggling in her arms. How her husband sprawled on the visitor’s chair with a five o’clock shadow and frightening bags beneath his eyes and watched them with the most tender, puzzled look she’d ever seen. How utterly _lost_ they both felt, wondering what the hell to do now, because in Tammy’s words, _here’s a breakable, bendable person we love with our entire being, and there isn’t a fucking manual for this._

And when she meets Lou’s eyes, Debbie understands. What she feels now is incomparable to parenthood, but it’s something akin to what Tammy described—an older, wearier cousin of that daunting _what now? How do we do this?_

Debbie unbuckles her nude pumps and slips them off her feet to match Lou in height. She sits down next to her, sinking into a desperate silence.  Lou, indomitable Lou—who crafts solutions out of thin air, who finishes fights, who puts out candles with her tongue—watches her through storm-blue eyes, begging her to know what to do. Quietly, hesitantly, Debbie slips an arm around her partner’s waist, and she feels Lou do the same. Lou’s other hand clasps the green-eyed cobra. When Debbie stands, Lou stands too, trembling and unaccustomed to the remake of her own body. Debbie’s discarded shoes glint in the flare of fluorescent light.

 

* * * * *

 

They drive Northeast through Utah and Colorado, watching the landscape darken to the color of tangerines and bushfires, then fade to a smoky grey. The Rockies tower over them when they finally pull into a Motel 6, sheltering wildflowers and patches of summer snow.

Tammy calls first, and Debbie gives her the rundown while Lou sits in a lukewarm shower. She offers to tell the others, so Debbie doesn’t have to, so she and Lou can curl up in a cheap hotel quilt and figure out how their lives are going to change.

The next phone call is from Daphne, who informs them that she’s catching a plane to New York ASAP and no one can stop her. Then Nine Ball, Amita, Constance. Even Rose, who barely uses her mobile phone. The turnover of friendly voices touches her—the gang is rallying, turning up for she and Lou because apparently nothing fosters friendship like stealing a hundred and fifty million dollars in diamonds.

Lou emerges from the bathroom in a plaid cotton robe. Debbie holds her waist, steadies her, and they limp to the tatty queen-sized bed. “Thanks,” says Lou bitterly as she sits down.  

“Yeah,” Debbie replies, rubbing feather-light circles on her back. The cane, an implement for balance more than support, lies on the carpet. Lou glares at it.

“God, I’m not used to this.” Lou chuckles, her shoulders shaking.

“You almost died, Lou. You _did_ die. You don’t have to be used to it right now.” _I almost lost you._ It’s selfish, sure, but she lived five years without Lou, and she won’t do it again.

Lou’s eyes glisten. She laughs something throaty and harsh. “I don’t know what I’m doing, honey. I know how to wait for a wound to heal; I waited five years and eight months for you to get out of jail, but this isn’t a waiting game. My body is… different, misaligned. It’s as fixed as it’ll ever be.” She sighs. “I haven’t figured out how to live with that yet.”

“Lou, look at me.”

She looks—wet, ice-blue eyes, all cheekbones and stubborn pride. Debbie kisses her. She loves this woman, this reckless, ritzy lover, patron saint of neon club lights and the vibrant blossoms of cacti.

“I don’t care,” she mumbles into Lou’s lips. “I don’t care if you walk with that stupid supervillain cane; I don’t care about scars; I don’t care if you don’t look invincible anymore.”

When they break apart, Debbie’s heart beats into her ribs at a million miles an hour. Her breaths come in heated pants. “I’m so in love with you. I’m sorry it took me this damn long.”

“Sweetheart,” Lou purrs, as if she hasn’t teared up. “I’ve been gone on you for decades.”

This time, she captures Lou’s lips in the searing kiss she deserves and feels the rapturous rumble of Lou’s vocal chords against her hand. She pushes her back into the mattress, sliding a hand between the buttons of her vest and tugging them open one by one.

“How do you want to do this?” Lou asks as they part for air.

“Carefully,” she says, deadpan. "Here.” She musters the swagger to take the lead she once imagined Lou would take, and Lou bares herself naked with her back on the sheets, her good leg bent and Debbie between her knees. Debbie kisses her way down collarbones and bare breasts. She takes Lou’s taut nipple between her teeth, eliciting a husky moan. Her fingers flutter over the scar on Lou’s cheek, the one beneath her ribs, and down her hipbone, before slipping between her thighs.  

Funny—she always thought that when they cracked, it would be Lou slamming her into a brick wall, kissing her sloppily, drunkenly, scotch on her breath and her hands all up in Debbie’s cocktail dress. She didn’t think it would be this languorous, that Lou would be so delicate and pliable, coming undone beneath her. “You’re really something,” Debbie murmurs, bringing her mouth back to Lou’s and reveling in the feeling of Lou’s wanting tongue between her lips.

Lou smells like Old Spice and shampoo, and Debbie breathes her in. She dips two experimental fingers into Lou’s center and cradles her when she arches off the bed, conscious of the injury to which neither of them has adjusted. “Fuck,” she growls, thrusting and curving into Lou, fitting the shapes of them like gears on a clock as it ticks down to the hour. Her sex aches; she labors on Lou’s wiry body, the flex and flux of her musculature as she climbs, and she thinks all the dubstep club-stall sex she had in her twenties will never compare to making love to Lou Miller in a Motel 6.  

When Lou comes, it’s quiet, a whimper from her chest and the ripple of her abdominal muscles beneath Debbie’s expert lips. Debbie hardly has to work herself to tip into orgasm with her, collapsing loose-limbed and short of breath, her lips still drifting down Lou’s midsection. She explores Lou without haste, as she has always been and as she has changed.

“Was that my delayed ‘welcome back to the land of the living?’” Lou asks when Debbie has settled, and their fingers have locked beneath the sheet.

“Something like that,” Debbie replies with a smug, post-coital smile.

“You know,” says Lou, her voice deepening thoughtfully, “I came back because I couldn’t bear for the last thing I ever sent you to be a picture of a plant.”

Debbie snorts. There’s something absurd about the whole thing, maybe because she didn’t see Lou for the first month after the crash, but there’s something darkly comic about Lou rising from the dead like the dapper, immortal being she is.

“It was a very pretty plant.” A cactus flower the color of a storm-born dawn.

Lou huffs. “I turned down the pearly gates for you,” she scoffs with a lopsided grin—the first snarky, all-Lou smile she’s seen since she arrived.

“Bullshit.” Debbie smirks. “We’re hellbound, Baby.” _And I wouldn’t have it any other way._

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this sapped up a good percent of my emotional energy. 
> 
> I owe emkat97 for the "Lou looking like a pimp with badass cane" prompt on Tumblr and alannaofroses on Tumblr for the Lou hurt/comfort prompt.
> 
> https://poeticsandaliens.tumblr.com/image/175321164068 for the image-set.


End file.
